Religious Donations, Ritual Offerings, and Humanitarian Aid: Fields of Practice According to Forms of Giving in Burma

Abstract

Abstract In this paper, the religious donation–meaning oriented interactions that occur between a lay donor and his or her monastic recipient or between laypeople and religious institutions as a whole–is first examined in the Burmese Buddhist context, in regard to the Maussian theory of the gift. The formal analysis of ‘serving rice’ to monks during their daily alms tour, the main form of religious donation, demonstrates that it is in keeping with the definition of a free gift rather than involving reciprocity, although it is supposed to be rewarded by merit through an impersonal process. Then, moving from a formal analysis of the ethnography of religious donation ( ahlu ) to the contextual analysis of the differentiated uses of various forms of giving in contemporary Burma, the discussion aims at highlighting differences with practices of ‘ritual offering’ ( kadaw bwe ) and ‘humanitarian aid’( ke hse yay ) showing how these different forms of interaction shape contrasted fields of practice. The transaction occurring in religious donations then emerges as setting into motion a crucial social process, the enactment and reproduction of the difference in status between monastics and laypeople that is one of the main social processes contributing to the differentiation of a Buddhist‐defined ‘religious field’.

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